by interestingfacts.com
Each musical instrument has its own amazing facts and stories. Here are astounding facts from the world of musical devices, both familiar and unusual.
1-The Piano Defies Classification
What type of musical instrument is a piano? When a piano is played, each key controls a hammer that strikes a tuned string inside, which puts it in a uniquely complicated category. The sound resonates from strings, making it a stringed instrument like a harp or a guitar — but the action that produces the sound is a strike, putting it in the percussion category, along with other melodic instruments like the xylophone or steel drum.
Since it actually doesn’t have to be one or the other, pianos are largely considered to be both a percussion and stringed instrument. Both describe how the piano works. Some consider the piano to be a form of hammered dulcimer, another hammered-string instrument that’s hard to pin down. It’s also a keyboard instrument, which are never just keyboard instruments alone — that would also include the pipe organ (wind), harpsichord (string), glockenspiel (percussion), and synthesizer (electronic).
2 Our knowledge of synthesizers came from classical music
The synthesizer was popular in experimental music and sound effects before 1968, but it took a collection of Johann Sebastian Bach music to propel it into the mainstream.
Released at the end of that year, the groundbreaking album Switched On Bach, by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos, used a Moog synthesizer to show mainstream music fans and executives alike that the technology had more universal applications.
“Bach seemed to be an ideal type of music to use,” Carlos explained. The multi-track recorder allowed her to layer the melodies, she said, and Bach’s music used only one note at a time, which accommodated the limits of the synthesizer back then. “It was the perfect marriage of the right technology, the right techniques,” she said.
The album features ten compositions by Bach, and won multiple Grammy Awards in 1970: Classical Album of the Year, Best Classical Performance by an Instrumental Soloist, and Best Engineered Recording, Classical. Its follow-up, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, was nominated for two.
Even if you’re not familiar with Carlos, who has also released albums of original works, you may have heard her music in the chilling scores for A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.
3-Leo Fender didn’t play guitar
Fender is one of the most popular guitar and amplifier brands, perhaps best known for its enduring classic the Stratocaster electric guitar. The founder’s interest and expertise, however, was solidly in creation, not performance.
Before founding his company and inventing the first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar, Leo Fender was a radio repairman who sometimes tinkered with his musician friends’ instruments. When he started actually creating them, he relied heavily on their feedback during development.
While he briefly played piano and saxophone as a youth, even after decades in the guitar business, he never actually learned how to play the instrument. Legend has it that he couldn’t even tune one. He was too busy tinkering with them:
Country music guitarist Bill Carson (who has been dubbed the “test pilot of the Stratocaster”) told Reverb that Fender would show up to his gigs to swap out equipment.
“Leo would visit the clubs pretty often where I was working, and sometimes he would bring another amplifier in at that time and want me to exchange it for the one that I had,” Carson said. “He’d take the other one, and take it back to the shop sometimes in the middle of the night to work on it. I just never knew anybody that was as involved in what they were doing and [lived] it 24 hours a day.”
4-Two organs are played by waves
At least three large-scale, interactive art installations have greeted visitors with music made by the waves and tides — and two of them survive today.
The Wave Organ by Peter Richards and George Gonzalez was built in 1986 on a jetty made from material from a demolished cemetery. Twenty-five PVC organ pipes are scattered at varying heights above the water, and make sound when the waves hit them below. The best time to visit is during high tide, when higher waves create more frequent notes.
Another example, the Sea Organ in Zadar, Croatia, by Nikola Bašić, was constructed in 2005 on a new jetty for receiving cruise ships. In this case, the tubes run beneath a series of steps descending into the water.
Thirty-five polyethylene pipes use the motion of the tide to create tones from hollowed-out squares at the base of the steps along nearly 230 feet of waterfront; the sounds change the farther you travel along the jetty. Similar to the Wave Organ, when the tide is low, the sounds are more subtle, becoming more lively as the tide gets higher.
A third, the High Tide Organ by Liam Curtin and John Gooding in Blackpool, England, was torn down in late 2021. Curtin, who said he was doing some repairs himself, called for its demolition, citing neglect — but considering it outlasted its planned lifespan by several years, it had a good run.
The metal structure, completed in 2002 as part of a larger sculpture installation along the seafront promenade, was a single, tall steel sculpture that hooks at the top. A series of valves beneath organ pipes were manipulated by the high tide below, with the metal creating a more whistle-like sound than the large-scale plastic installations.
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